2025 is poised to be a pivotal year as organizations worldwide position generative AI as a top strategic priority, with 83% of CDOs and data leaders making it a key focus. This growing emphasis on AI mirrors broader data trends: Data modernization was the top area of investment in 2024, and 82% of organizations with advanced data and analytics maturity saw consistent year-over-year revenue growth. Experts from Fivetran, Databricks, Snowflake, dbt Labs, and Hakkoda share their insights into the key trends and predictions for data and AI in 2025, including the rise of open data lakes, real-time data observability, knowledge graphs, governance, RAG technology, utility compute, and centralized data ecosystems. These predictions highlight the growing importance of tools and capabilities such as data lakes, query engines, guardrails, retrieval-augmented generation, utility compute, and AI governance, which will enable businesses to unlock valuable insights from unstructured data, drive smarter decisions in supply chain operations, and ensure accurate and reliable AI deployments.